Why, Oh Why Can’t I ?

I am now the proud owner of a video iPod. News junkie and uber-geek that I am, the first videos I watched on it were newscasts.

And then I didn’t. Stupid me, I had totally forgotten that my iPod is Mac formatted and that the computer at my current gig is a PC.

When I recently replaced my first generation iPod, I just had to get the video model because I wanted to watch that day’s ABC World News podcast and the Fox News Flashes on my commuter rail journey home. Fourty-five minutes of just my iPod and my noise canceling headphones, completely oblivious to the jerks talking too loud on their cellphones. (I have a special playlist of songs with lots of high frequency sounds that I turn up to earsplitting volume when I sit next to the worst walkie-talkie mode offenders. I’m beginning to loose my hearing anyway, so I get great pleasure in counter-annoying.)

So there I was on my first workday with my new gadget, and I plug it in to my desktop and iTunes politely asks if I want to re-format it. No, duh! So I walk it around the corner to the Art Director’s office (who had already left) and logged in to my account on her Mac. Downloaded the World News Webcast, plugged-in my iPod, and “This file type cannot be played on this device.” Now, although that was just a file type format blunder, that only happens occasionally (and whose fault – ABC or Apple), needless to say I have still not watched a same-day video podcast yet. After all, I’m already late for the train. Who has time to download podcasts in someone else’s office? If Macs can read and make PC formatted CD-ROMs, why can’t iTunes read and write to Mac and PC formatted iPods?